Tag Archives: politics

EconoSpeak: Playing With The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Barkley Rosser Over the last month crude oil prices have noticeably declined from in the neighborhood of $85-86 per barrel to $78-80 per barrel. But there has been only a very small decline in retail gasoline prices, and the headlines even as of yesterday was all about “sharply rising gas prices.”  So, Pres. Biden has moved to release a record amount of oil from the Strategic Petroleum...

Former Washington Monthly writer Nancy Le Tourneau had this post up on her own site Horizons. The topic? Biden signing proclamations restoring the original boundaries of Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Northeast Canyons, and Seamounts National Monuments. “A President for ALL Americans,” Horizons, Nancy LeTourneau’s big picture look at politics and life Nancy: I didn’t recognize the picture on the left. It was apparently taken...

Some, if not all, of the original thirteen may have had some claim to state’s rights in that as individual and separate colonies they had known some autonomy. None of the states admitted later, with the possible exception of Texas, had claim to such rights. Any legitimate claim by Texas, or any of the thirteen original, was abrogated with their secession from the Union during the Civil War. So many of our current ills are attributable to this...

Classical liberalism has an uneasy relationship with democracy.  Friedrich Hayek, for example, argued in The Constitution of Liberty and in Law, Legislation, and Liberty that democracy might need to be suspended to preserve liberal economic institutions.  And he meant it, as his support for Pinochet in Chile made clear.  Democracy in America is now under serious threat due to the increased radicalization of the Republican party.  Donald Trump...

The Rittenhouse Verdict and the Future of Vigilante Violence There are typically two levels in a case like Rittenhouse’s, the individual issues of justice and accountability, and the social implications of the crime and its judicial resolution.  I want to spend a moment with the second. America faces an impending crisis of vigilante suppression of democratic rights.  In the past year we’ve seen militias openly threatening violence in takeovers...

Repeated Lying About Lying  Of course, Donald Trump has been using this Big Lie method of simply endlessly repeating a Big Lie and successfully so with his claim that last year’s presidential election was “rigged” or “stolen,” according to the latest poll I just saw on the order of 70% of Republicans accepting this Big Lie. But this practice seems to be spreading for yet more degeneration happening as figures who have not done this like Trump...

Dems Continue To Sink Despite Improving Economy  On the first page of today’s Washington Post was reported a poll showing that when a random sample was asked, 46% said they would vote for a generic Republican candidate for Congress versus 43% for a generic Democratic candidate. Given reported further pro-GOP gerrymandering, if this were to hold for next year’s midterms, GOP would certainly take solid control of the House, if not the Senate.  Not...

I actually subscribe to a substack (even though I have a rule to never ever pay for web content). I have made 2 exceptions Talking Points Memo and Noahpinion. That written, one of the ways in which I find Noah Smith extremely stimulating is that I often, almost always, disagree with some of the many ideas he packs into each post. I this case, I object to one “two”. Noah wrote “Unfortunately, neither of America’s two political movements seems...

We are almost two years into this pandemic, and a K-8 school in Boston is being forced to close for 10 days due to lack of testing capacity.  First, capacity was inadequate to quell an outbreak: Curley’s school testing program became overwhelmed when more than 500 students a day needed testing. That meant some infected students remained in school before getting tested for COVID-19 or getting their results. And now testing capacity is inadequate...

Seldom do we get the chance to build something the way it should be. For the internet, the first chance was back in the 1990s. Not enough was known then. We’ve learned a lot the hard way since. Let us begin our design by asking, “How best to utilize the internet?” It is apparent that everyone needs, should have basic access. Access on the order of that afforded by the U. S. Postal Service all the years. Like the Postal Service over all the years,...